Do e-mails take up most of your working hours, sometimes to the point of making it look like responding to e-mails is your only job function? If so, then it is time to have an e-mail management strategy!
We bring you quick and easy e-mail management tips!
- Have a simplified filing system – four or five broad categories at best. Give them easy-to-keep-up-with names like "in-progress", "done", "to-be-done", etc. You can always add more categories, but the lesser, the better.
- Be ruthless and delete mails that you think you will need some day. If you are thinking twice about saving it, get rid of it right now.
- Make use of the ‘rules’ feature in your mailbox and send every sales and marketing promotion e-mailer to the junk folder.
- Keep your primary mail box clear of clutter at all times. Drive traffic jammers like newsfeeds, blogs, etc. to a separate folder. Set up a free RSS reader like Digg Reader or Feedly and get rid of the news related mails altogether. Get your headlines directly from the reader. All you need to do is start an account with the reader service and add the URLs of all the news / blog sites you want to read about.
- If it takes under 2 minutes to read and respond to an e-mail, do it right away. If not file away under your ‘waiting list’.
- E-mails you are bcc’d on are for your information only. Spend less time on them.
- If instant messaging gets some kind of tasks done faster, explore the option further rather then sending e-mails.
- If you intend to follow up on certain requests you sent over mail, cc yourself on those and save them to your "follow-up" folder. So when the time comes to follow up, you don’t have to spend too much time searching for a particular mail.
- Automate your sign-off or get rid of it altogether. That way you will be sending out shorter emails. You don’t need a signature on internal e-mails for instance.
- Get straight to the point so that everyone in the loop can save precious time. You will also get faster responses this way.
- Set up your smart phone to receive emails so that you can respond on-the-go and attend to other things when you are back in your cubicle.
- Then there is the smartest one of them all – to receive less emails, send less emails. Pick up the phone and make that call.
By Kontent Factory
Image source